Thought I'd let people know, in case they were curious.
I've only played a few minutes but...I'm very underwhelmed. For all the hate a lot of woke games get, you're often hearing only one side, and so they're often better than you might think. Not excusing wokeness, and I hate the state of modern gaming, but point is if you just hear the negative sides of a game, you might be impressed on playing it, even if there's plenty that annoys you.
This is not the case with D4. It feels like a fucking mobile game. I'm only a few minutes in, as mentioned, but it starts with a decent cinematic (not as mindblowing compared to past Blizzard games when compared to the technology of the time, but not terrible or anything), then hits with "connecting to servers" and stuff, with "accessibility" options turned on, including text-to-speech. It has an AI voice telling you it's connecting to servers, that's your next intro to the game. Already leaves you with a weird taste. Next thing is it pushes you right to the aforementioned accessibility options. Next is character creation. I suspect the characters are randomly generated, but I had four blacks, and one fatass female (Druid is always fat.)
As to the actual gameplay, as I said, it feels like a mobile game. Not far enough in to fully judge, but my initial impression was very underwhelming. And, again, was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, as I think a lot of woke games get an exaggeratedly bad image, since we're hearing only the one side. But, yeah, just feels kind of clunky so far, and zoomed in a bit too much. Music is good, though, from what I've heard. Classic Diablo-style music. Mutes on Alt-Tab by default though.
Anyway, I'll stop rambling. I don't want to color anyone's opinions and, if you are curious, I do actually suggest you try it while it's free. But I was surprised at just how much I didn't like my first dip into it, and thought I'd share. For all the woke nonsense, I expected to like it more than my initial impressions.
not even for free.
I bought it at launch. Easily the worst game I've ever paid money for and one of the stupidest decisions I've made in my life. Should have paid for a kick to the balls instead, would have saved me the hours I spent grimacing pretending I wasn't entirely disgusted and bored by it.
https://shamebell.com
I feel you man, I preordered Diablo 3. Never again. I don't even buy Early Access games on Steam anymore.
Not even if they paid me.
Correct.
"Not even with a borrowed dick" is the phrase that comes to mind.
I watched the cinematics online. That's all I cared for, and even that for the sake of tradition alone.
Lol no. Blizzard burned their bridge long ago.
Not saying you should buy it. You fucking shouldn't.
But if anyone wants to get a firsthand experience, I thought I'd let people know that I noticed it's currently free.
Chill, mah dude.
And that's fine. What I'm saying is that around here at least you probably won't get many takers. Compared to even other big name developers and publishers, Blizzard is radioactive. Only Epic has a worse rep and they're literally a cartel for the Chicoms.
Fair enough.
I just thought I'd mention it since, at least for me, D2 is pretty nostalgic. D4 (rightfully) has a bad impression on people, but most haven't played it firsthand. Currently, they could do so for free, if they were so inclined.
D2 is nostalgic for me as well. StarCraft 1 also.
But they're honestly really incomparable to whatever is wearing their skin right now.
I tried as hard as I could to like D4. I wanted it to be my everyday game for years. I played for about a month and just couldn't log on anymore the game is bad. When season 1 came out I played for like 2 hours and then decided I couldn't play the game ever again.
The story is garbage. Typical mary-sue bs with the young girl character. I almost lost it when you, the main character, decide to ask the teenage girl for advice on what to do with a key quest item because you trust her judgement and think she'd be better at deciding then you... And then you and some other dude are just like yeah teenage girl has super dangerous quest item, no big deal.
Honestly, the storyline sounds like it was written by a 23yo feminist college grad who did a degree in gender studies. It was like bad fanfic.
Gameplay is just boring as fuck. Didn't matter what class I was playing I actually didn't find any of the classes fun. None of the skill combos were satisfying to use to me. Tons of balance issues. 0 content in the game. Even more repetitive than Diablo 2. No goals to work toward. No feeling of getting more powerful. A pointless paragon system. The whole game is a giant joke.
Stay the fuck away.
You tried much harder than me to like it, and still couldn't. I already had a fairly massive distaste for it before I'd even gotten to much of the gameplay. It just doesn't feel good. And the feel is one of the most important aspects of an ARPG. Woke, not woke, barely even matters, if the gameplay and feel is good. D4 fails on both counts. Too zoomed in, looting isn't satisfying, characters aren't satisfying, nothing is satisfying.
Yeah, I didn't get there yet (probably won't, not sure how far in it is an I'm just going to be playing a bit while it's free), and it still fucking blew chunks.
Gatekeeping, gatekeeping, gatekeeping. Can we please fucking go back to gatekeeping?!
So far, that's been my experience. A big issue is, as I mentioned, it's just too zoomed in. Makes me wonder if a big issue with modern gaming isn't just narcissism in general. We already knew a bunch of the people involved in this are narcissists, but playing D4 made me realize that a huge issue with modern game design is just this whole "protagonist syndrome" thing. Even when you're supposed to be the fucking Savior of the Universe, they still manage to make you too prominent. Leave me alone, Writer, I got this already...fuck off.
I sort of want people to experience this agony for themselves while it's free but, yeah, certainly don't pay for it. So far this shit is bad.
Why did you even buy it? What part of you thought it wasn’t going to be complete woke garbage?
It was a mistake in hindsight but I just thought for sure there was no way Blizzard would fuck this one up after D3. Well, D4 was worse than D3.
Temporarily, at least.
So far, I'd rather play either D2 or D3. No way I'd pay $70, or even $50, or even $20 for D4.
Sad, Blizzard was one of my favorite companies for quite some time. Not sure how they fucked it up this bad.
D4 is basically just Marvel Cinematic Universe.
It's so high budget that everything is written by committee. There's too many people involved and too many egos to fix any mistakes, bad ideas are just forced through with money and inertia. It has to run on every platform from phones to pro gaming PCs.
At the same time they're investing so much that they're totally risk averse. They ape design from successful games, they gimp chat so they can't be responsible for hurting somebody's feelings, everything is pg-13.
They have "over 9000" people credited on the game. The movie-style credits roll goes on for 45 minutes.
Ironically they could have split just some of these people into groups of 12, have an internal competition with high-stakes consequences, and come out with many hit games better than D4 and a few new franchises that they could milk for decades to come. But they're institutionalized and not capable of innovation even though they still have some talented people working there.
the ethnics committee sucks out all the fun and soul out of a game.
It's not even the woke. I haven't run into any woke in the game after the character creation really. It's just uninspired and unimpressive so far.
You need to have a mix of unfuckable 90s-type D&D/comic nerds, 30-35 year olds who hung on to their superhero fantasies, one or two wizard level programmers, and absolutely no women to make really good Western games. They might have a different formula in Japan.
That sounds like a cool group of dudes to hang out with if you could just get them to shower.
Man, comic/boardgame stores have customers with the worst BO.
Don't forget the heavy metal.
Yup. No argument.
I remember that video from a while back where female "dungeon designers" were jilling themselves off to what a magnificent game they'd made.
There was a video around about some lesbo designers playing D4, they were incredibly bad at it. Not only are this people making the game now but someone at Blizzard thought showcasing their incompetent diversity hires was a good idea.
Then you weren’t paying attention. The game is wall to wall girl bosses.
Again, I'm not that far in. And, point is, the wokeness is the least of the problems. There have been games with "wall to wall girl bosses" that are more enjoyable than this.
You could multiply the wokeness I've experienced in this game so far by one hundred, it would probably make it better, just for the sake of comedy.
Not at its true value yet. It is still a piece of propaganda they want you to consume, so at its true value they should be paying you.
Wouldn't play it even if they paid me to. No telling what malware is hidden in that game's data.
Oh, and the UI and skill tree are both weird.
EDIT: And the map, and the inventory.
EDIT: Map sucks more than I thought. You can't move while having the map open. You could do that shit in D2, and I think D1.
EDIT: Inventory is straight ass. And inventory is core to the Diablo experience. Embarrassing. I can only imagine they'll ask you for cash to make it better down the line, or something.
EDIT: Dialogue system sucks. Highlight items system sucks. Everything sucks.
EDIT whatever: AND IT'S STILL FUCKING ZOOMED IN TOO MUCH! How do you fuck it up this bad?!
A price of 0 is still too expensive for this crap.
Diablo has gone so far astray from the original, it isn't funny. Especially when it comes to itemization. D4's is just straight up boring. And keep in mind I did not consider D2 an improvement beyond the addition of a stash ... it's only gotten more .. generic .. as it's gone along, and all the creepy charm of the original is long gone.
At least 2 and 3 could be played for a while for the hell of it, (once 3 fixed its early issues, like that dumbass auction house) and 2 had a decent storyline and gameplay, but this one .. is just dishwater dull.
Just dont bother western AAA companies anymore. You will save your self a lot of anger if you just stick to asian and indie games.
Is there any reason to play Diablo IV over POE?
Because D4 has a stopping point where you get bored and quit.
And POE is so good that it will totally consume your life if you are of the right mindset.
Apparently they trying to add some "coomer" stuff now lol. some kinda semi-sexy leather outfit and something where 1/5th of a booty cheek that sticks out of bottom.
Oh, also. I found it weird that it has cinematics with your character in it. As far as I recall, that was never a Diablo thing. Kind of funny, since they could have done it, back in even the D1 or D2 days, since they didn't have character creation then.
Look, it's an ARPG, I just want to get unceremoniously dumped into the action. Don't put my character in the cutscenes. Put interesting characters like the Wanderer, angels, and the Horadrim in there. Leave my character out of it.
Nitpick? Maybe. But still felt weird. Leave me alone, game.
D2 basically had Marius as some sort of PC stand in, where he was always 5 steps ahead of you showing how things were fucked up in this new Act and then the game itself was you fixing it.
Which is how it should be. It maintains the "ultra power fantasy" aspect that the game's seem to be trying to achieve with you killing Demon Lords, without needing to lobotomize your character into pure retardation to keep the plot moving by having them in the thick of it helping free them.
Also D3 was really bad at the same thing. Like, one of the classes was the Demon Hunter who literally exists on a resource called Hatred. Yet in the Heaven act he is talking about praying for the Angels to find peace as he rescues them. The same Angels who have been a smidge less evil than the Demons until suddenly in this Act they are suddenly the Shining Perfect Good Guys that everyone worships.
Seemingly only because the writers are so basic they couldn't not exist in a binary of Good vs Evil. Which considering the dialogue in that Act, I'm almost certain it wasn't even proofread by anyone before being shipped with how stupid it sounds.
I'm thinking about how much I would have to be paid to play this game and I'm pretty sure it would be an middle-class wage.
Modern AAA gaming has devolved to seeking the minimum viable product. Diablo 4 is a textbook example.
I'll just wait for the next Grim Dawn expansion that is susposedly coming next year.
Don't you people have phones?
A turd on the side of the road is free too, doesn't mean I'll try it out.
You don’t get to Gen your own characters? Do you have to pick one of the goblins it generates for you?
If you meant what I said about the characters being randomly generated, there is no default look for the characters around the campfire at character creation, but you can modify from there. And it does seem to heavily weight nonwhites and females. Also, I just checked, it's not complete random generation, I think there must be a few of each class, and it randomly chooses for each class.
So yes, you can modify characters, but you can't choose things like body size. Which would be fine (D1/D2 had no character creation, D3 had very limited as I recall), if the characters weren't so fugly.
Look up some D4 character creation vids. You can't even tell the different between most of the men and women, for starters; faces look very similar, men are scrawny and effeminate (necro, rogue, sorcerer), and the women don't have boobs at all, basically. The only mildly feminine character (aside from the men, lol) is the female sorcerer, and she still suffers from Same Face Syndrome. Barbarian is generally fine. Druid is hilariously, uh...body positive.
Oh, and there's vitiligo. That's all the rage now, for some reason.
Wasn't that just a reskinned Chinese mobile game? Or was it another Diablo game I'm thinking about
I suspect you're thinking of Diablo: Immoral, the whale-bait game where you'd need to spend $200K to cap out the T10 gems on a single character.
This folks... is why games will keep getting worse, becoming more woke, and soon people won't know what normal games are.
I'll take this time to mention I've been playing Titan Quest: Anniversary Edition, which I actually got for free (TO OWN) at some point. Plays just like Grim Dawn (I like GD's style a lot more), and scratches the Eagle Eye Action Looter itch.
Action Looter... reminds me that I should probably go back and finish Nioh 2 at some point.
Based on what? There have been several posts asking what people are playing and I think most people here do play games.
Most people would have loved Rings of Power or WoT if it was faithful to the lore, including good casting.
You confuse lack of enthusiasm for modern slop with lack of interest.
But you are correct on even a little woke, I have 0 tolerance for wokenes , even 1 race swap and I'm out.
Keep in mind that woke and bad writing go hand in hand, you can't be woke and have critical thinking or to respect source material. Wokenes is rooted in denying human nature and hatred.
My only exception was BG3 and I regret playing it, it tented the legacy of one of my favorite games. Not going to do that again.
I'm saying we have standards to various degrees, you said we don't like games or movies and we want to hate them.
How is that the same thing?
If I remember correctly, it was not just that the main character was a black woman, I haven't played either to be honest so I can only say from a vague memory of someone discussing it. It was something about having several women NPCs and very few male NPCs, I'm just guessing but the male NPCs need saving or are idiots and all the women NPCs are great at it?
I agree with the fact that a black female does not make it woke, it does make me not want to play it but it is not woke. Honestly if the woman is not hot I can't understand why you would want to play a game with a woman main character.
Apparently the second game is considered to be a cash grab with much lower quality then the first.
This makes me question if you think is good because it has a black female lead rather then if the game is good.
Makes you wonder, what is more racist, not playing a game because it has a black female lead or shilling for a bad game because it has a black female lead. The first option is just a question of taste.
That, and the dev spouts woke garbage. So go ahead and keep giving money to people who hate you.
And yeah, at this point I don't care: black woman protagonist in $CURRENT_YEAR = no buy, overtly woke developer or not. Cry about it all you want. I've got plenty of stuff to play that isn't cancer. Hell, I can fire up my Gamecube and go back and play the original Beyond Good and Evil if I want.
I don't get your take. Many beloved "nerd" franchises have been absolutely shat on in recent years. Star Wars. Star Trek. Wheel of Time. Blizzard games. Rings of Power. etc.
Wokeness may be (and, imho, is) a part of this, but that doesn't change the reality that these "new takes" on classics suck. That's not even a particularly niche opinion from rando shitlords on a stormcucked .win site.
I was a huge Star Trek fan, and today I'm completely disconnected from the franchise. It's not because the franchise is now woke, it's because it sucks and no longer feels connected to the Star Trek of the 70s through 00s. The nicest thing that even fans say is that it's a new take to modernize Star Trek for audiences these days, etc.
You can find plenty of recommendations of games, books, movies, etc., on this site.
Lower Decks is actually pretty funny, especially starting in the second season, and the writers do seem to know their Trek.
And I've come to realize that Mariner is a joke in and of herself, being the product of nepotism and Starfleet Academy probably having a "try not to fail ANYONE" policy ... and you get a lower decker who doesn't like "authority" (this was from the shitty first episode, which failed to recognize that farm implements can certainly double as weapons ...)
And yeah, the casual nepotism of Trek should be a red flag ...
OMG, fuck you, YouTube, I'm not turning off my ad blockers for you to send me malware through them.
I've promoted Lower Decks here on many occasions, and I don't recall ever getting downvoted. Side note, anyone who cares about up and downdoots should STOP caring.
SNW is debatable. It's better than Disco, I just find it deathly dull. THe Lower Decks/SNW crossover was one of the best things I've ever seen.
Strange New Worlds is just more girl bosses saving the day while the men sit around wishing they could be as smart and resourceful. It’s too consistent to be a coincidence, either.
This flies in the face of the philosophies and themes from the older shows. It is incongruous with what we already have.
People who parrot the “Strange New Worlds is great Trek” line are just repeating the opinion that they hear get said a lot. At best it’s an okay science fiction show.
You can blame that one on the WoW team, who decided about 7 Expansions ago that "you get to forge your own legendary!" was a good idea as a replacement to pure drop chance. Which then expanded to "the entire expansion is about upgrading your personal legendary item" shortly after and has been since.
Modern Blizzard has huge overlap between its IPs in terms of ideas and implementations, so its almost certainly they took the inspiration from there.
With a healthy helping of D3 eventually devolving into "get this legendary or you don't have a build" every single season, so clearly they think the entire Diablo experience should be "get wild legendary that creates an entire build around itself!" and wanted to skip the low power part of that grind.
"small" wokeness is like a tiny turd in a glass full of drinking water. Go ahead and chug that sucker down, after all the turd is really small!
ok and?
If that was your conclusion then I hope you are 15 or less, it means your brain has enough time to develop.
Ok buddy, don't forget to take your meds.
From my understanding, the builds are shoe horning the player into two subsets of each class. It doesn’t allow the player the freedom to choose. Just holds your hand and gives you two choices.
Also I hear there are absurd micro transactions in the game. They already charged $70 for the game and expect people to pony up more?
D3 certainly had problems when it was released. I revisited that game years later and they had mostly fixed the issues and I enjoyed the game.
I’m not holding out the same confidence for D4.
D3 was not bad, I played it for a while. It was not great but it was fun to play with friends for a while. But It never reached the same addictive quality as POE.
It was also missing the creepy vibe of D2 and arguably an incredible bad story. You are a nephalem, descendent from mixing angels and demons, this makes you immune to fate and you can follow your own path. Now go and fulfil the prophecy?!?